Serious problem with my hard drive, or at least what it's displaying.

Arthil

Okay I'm opening and reopening the My Computer folder and whenever I hover over my C: Drive to check the space left on it, it keeps going lower and lower. It's also been halving the space randomly. I've got 8.50 GB or so and it would half itself to 4.30 or so and everything would run slow. Does anyone have any idea what is happening here? I'd provide more information, but I'm not sure what brand the hard drive is.

zanetheinsane

Are you running TVersity of any other media streaming programs?

1ddqd

It could be a worm that's filling your hard drive with dubious copies of files...that used to be a major problem, but it still happens.

Arthil

I am watching a stream, though at the moment it isn't actually streaming, just showing archives. I'm not sure whether it would be a worm though, unless the hard drive going back and forth between space being left is common. I'll see what happens when not watching this stream, though.

Ego

Could just be your page-file resizing itself for virtual memory, tried setting windows to use a set page-file size in your virtual memory configuration? Usually it's faster than having windows dynamically adjust it anyhow. If you're running something causing a big memory leak, this will also bring the symptoms to the forefront.

Arthil

I'd be willing to try that, but I'm not even sure how to go about doing it.

Ego

No sweat,

hit windows key + R

In the run-box, enter sysdm.cpl

click the 'advanced' tab from the system properties window that pops up

click the 'settings' button that's in the box labeled 'Performance'

now click the 'advanced' tab from the 'Performance Options' menu

click the 'change' button in the box labeled 'Virtual Memory'

You then pick the drive, and choose 'custom size' for your paging file and input an initial and maximum size (which you can put as the same number, so windows doesn't start making the pagefile larger as you use the computer.

Phew, hope I got all those steps right.

zanetheinsane

TVersity, Orb, and Winamp Remote have been known to have their temp folders get ridiculously out of hand sometimes, filling up the hard drive.

If you have enabled Offline Files and Folders for a network drive there may be a CSC folder in your windows directory. Check that and make sure.

L*2*G*X

Could be windows saving batches of data to the disk. It'll find corrupted data on the drive, save it to disk, adding it in the root as a folder with random name, (AAAHJOKELGLDJ) then repeat it later.
I've seen this behavior when disks were fucked, just not sure which service is doing it.
Get your data off and safe, then check the disk.

Arthil

I know this may be considered thread necromancy but I needed to make sure so I don't fuck anything up. Before I go and do what Ego told me to what number should I use to set my virtual memory? If it depends on my actual RAM that is only 512 MB, but I wanted to know whether I should set it high, or low. It's set at 768 at the low point, and I'm not sure if I should set the maximum as that as well.

Ego

Rule of thumb is 1.5x your physical amount of memory but it's just a rule of thumb. With 512 megs of memory, you probably don't want to only have a 768mb pagefile. Though you might want a small pagefile if you're specifically doing this to look for a memory leak (because you'll get errors when it fills up.) For actual use, I'd set both fields for pagefile size to 2048mb or even the maximum allowable if you can spare the HD space.

If you've got 512 megs of memory though, chances are the space you've noticed disappear/reappear was due to the pagefile resizing.

You don't have to worry about changing these settings, in the very worst case scenario you can boot to windows in safe-mode (F8 while booting, though you probably know this) and change things back to having windows automatically handle it.

Arthil

So going the route you suggested should fix the problem? I'll admit at the moment I couldn't make it out too well since I'm half asleep, but was just curious.

Ego

Well, if your remaining space is changing because the pagefile is resizing automatically, you don't technically have a problem... you're enjoying a feature (hehe,) it's just kind of annoying (and setting pagefile to be one size will marginally increase performance as your system will never waste time resizing it.) Setting it to one size also means you'll know if something else is randomly eating up space, which is something you'd probably like to be aware of.

Even if that's old DDR, you might wish to consider a memory upgrade. It's amazing the difference even just another 512 makes for performance.

If you want to optimize your pagefile size (so as to keep as much free space possible on your HD for your own real use), set it to 768 as the minimum size and 2048 as the max size, and then actually monitor how big your pagefile gets over the course of the day as you do computery things on your computer (do this by looking at the actual file, not through the task-manager, as the task-manager for some reason rarely reports the correct size of pagefile.sys.) Then set the pagefile to be 500ish megs on top of the largest size your pagefile generally gets through use, when you're confident you know what that is.

Generally I just set my pagefile to either use the maximum allowable or to be at minimum if I have enough RAM. I used to turn it off completely with enough memory, but Vista more or less demands the presence of a pagefile to work properly regardless of how much RAM you've got.

Arthil

I think I may test out setting the minimum as low and the maximum as high. However there is one important question, where is the pagefile.sys file located? And I'd love to upgrade, but this thing uses old DDR, and only that. It's not worth it trying to upgrade this heap really, I'm aiming to build a brand new one, but that isn't on topic. I'll report back in this thread with what happens, likely tomorrow.

Ego

pagefile.sys is in c:\, but it's a hidden system file. You can either edit your folder options in windows to see hidden files but the easiest way to check it's size is to run a command prompt (windows key + R, type 'cmd' into the field, then click 'ok')

when you've got your command prompt up, type:

dir c:\pagefile.sys /a

and hit enter

You'll get a bit of text output which will include the size of pagefile.sys in bytes (divide by 1024 twice and you'll have the size in megabytes.) It'll look more or less like this:

Volume in drive C has no bible
Volume Serial Number is 7134-45BC

Directory of c:\

11/05/2008 12:00 AM 8,901,943,296 pagefile.sys
1 File(s) 8,901,943,296 bytes
0 Dir(s) 143,236,291,072 bytes free

Bold is your pagefile size.

Sorry, somehow missed your question on the first read so I didn't reply right away.